On the Road Home
(2007, 18-channel audio, 16:30)
The piece was specifically composed to take advantage of the possibilities presented by an unusual speaker installation – three concentric rings – in the Kleiner Wasserspeicher (Small Water reservoir), an underground 19th century structure in Berlin, now dry and occupied by Singuhr Hoergalerie. Axial and radial vaults traverse the 35m circular room, creating a vast labyrinth, and permitting a complete reorientation and division of the architecture through multichannel sound.
On the Road Home takes its title and ontological structure from the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name. The core of the music maps and translates the dual concerns of the poem directly into sonic activity and spatial orientation. Henderson creates a disassembled view of the nature of truth, and the ways in which Stevens’ protagonists conspire to confirm it through sensual observations. To express this, Henderson began by making field-recordings of personal journeys toward different notions of home. He transforms these into a spatial counterpoint of interlocking parts, which play simultaneously in different areas of the space. The audience was encouraged to walk around during the performance, so that each person experienced a different path to the ending: an audio manifestation of Stevens line ...the silence was largest, And longest... For this conclusion, two massive 10,000 Watt subwoofers played an ultralow frequency coda, inaudible to the ear, but physically resonating inside the body, literally inspiring awe and shimmering the air.
On the Road Home takes its title and ontological structure from the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name. The core of the music maps and translates the dual concerns of the poem directly into sonic activity and spatial orientation. Henderson creates a disassembled view of the nature of truth, and the ways in which Stevens’ protagonists conspire to confirm it through sensual observations. To express this, Henderson began by making field-recordings of personal journeys toward different notions of home. He transforms these into a spatial counterpoint of interlocking parts, which play simultaneously in different areas of the space. The audience was encouraged to walk around during the performance, so that each person experienced a different path to the ending: an audio manifestation of Stevens line ...the silence was largest, And longest... For this conclusion, two massive 10,000 Watt subwoofers played an ultralow frequency coda, inaudible to the ear, but physically resonating inside the body, literally inspiring awe and shimmering the air.